Griffin’s Theory on Rejection and Recovery

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It’s easy to write stories — just type a bunch of words, and after a while you’ve got a story. What’s tougher is to show the stories to other people, tougher still to send them to editors whose professional mandate is to reject very nearly 100% of everything sent to them. That’s the deal you sign up for, though, if your goal is not only to write words but to form them into stories, and then to see the work published. You have to send the work out.

You have to detach a bit, remind yourself how long the odds are, especially for a new writer. Not only must the story be top-notch, it also needs to be the right fit at the right time. Even after moderating expectations, even if you’re the thickest-skinned, most confident individual, when a story comes back with a rejection form there’s still at least a twinge of disappointment.

Writers have to be self-assured, and full of the buzz of their own competence, in order to produce good work. The narrator needs to be able to proceed with that affirmative “Yes!” attitude underlying the putting of new words to the page. How best to reconcile these two things, then: the diminishment of self-esteem that occurs each time a submission comes back, and the upkeep of one’s own confidence in the face of repeated, frequent rejections?

My theory is that each rejection unavoidably represents a small chipping-away of the foundation of self-assurance. If the writer wants to keep going, to avoid ending up reduced to a self-loathing drunk who no longer writes a word – or worse, one of those writers who keeps writing but stops sending things out — the task is to reduce the damage. I try to help myself on two fronts.

First, I keep disappointment in perspective when a rejection comes back. I remind myself of all the usual stuff: It’s not personal. Plenty of great stories are rejected many times before finding a home or even winning awards. All my favorite writers accumulated many more rejections than I’ve yet seen. And so on.

Aside from trying to reduce the “damage” from each rejection by rationalization, though, I also spend time on the opposite effort. That is, rather than minimizing damage from the outside, I try to shore up confidence from the inside. Make goals, and keep track of progress toward them. This reminds me I’m doing all I can toward creating good work, and getting it out there. I also revisit earlier works I consider most successful periodically, to remind myself I know how to form a great story and write compelling words when I work a story through all the many drafts and revisions.

Every writer unavoidably faces knock-downs or disappointments. I try to keep my foundation strong by working hard, keeping track of forward progress, and occasionally pulling out one of my better final drafts and studying it. It can help to read interviews by writers who have made it, to take heart in their stories of struggle, of wallpapering their offices with rejection slips before finally breaking through. In many of life’s endeavors it’s enough just to work hard, but in some things such as the art of writing fiction, you have to not only work hard, but persist. That means making effort along the way to keep one’s morale propped up and avoid discouragement taking hold.

SF Academy 05 – Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson

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Just recently finished The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson, which I liked quite a bit. It reminded me of Spin in a superficial way, as if drafted from the same rough outline, with different details. You can always tell when an author has traveled in a certain part of the world because they start making all their characters visit that area so they have an excuse to sprinkle in details learned in their travels. In Wilson’s case, without knowing for sure, I’d wager he’s visited SE Asia.

In this one, the protagonist is a sort of hippie slacker living in very poor conditions in Bangkok, when a giant artifact from the future materializes nearby. This monument, the Chronolith of the title, announces a future victory by the conqueror Kuin, a name note yet known at the time of the story. This sudden “visitation,” constituting proof of a looming, threatening force, spreads fear throughout the world and causes societies to virtually all at once close up shop. In other words, most people become so fearful of something bad happening in the future they essentially give up twenty years before any conquering has even happened.

Because this is a Robert Charles Wilson book, the relationships are all haunted and broken (not saying that’s how Wilson’s own relationships are, but in the books I’ve read, his characters are all in that boat), and the parent-child relationships are especially tortured. It’s an engrossing story, though, as our protagonist gets caught up into an effort to understand the Chronoliths (because the one in Thailand is not the last to appear) and realizes his proximity to the first appearance gives him a sort of unavoidable connection to the entire drama of Kuin, attempts to prevent more monoliths, and those who worship Kuin (who doesn’t even exist yet) as all-powerful.

My first experience with reading Wilson’s work was Spin, probably his best book. While the others I’ve read have also been quite good, they’ve been at least a notch below that high point. I’d recommend this book if you’ve already read Spin and enjoyed it, but if you haven’t, then just read that one!

I love this writer, though, and plan to keep working through his books. Canadian sci-fi is strong these days! Next up, Blind Lake.

Literate Yet Happily Book-Free?

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Just a quick one today.

As this blog focuses almost entirely on reading and writing, I think you know where I stand on the value of the written word. Not just the written word, which includes newspapers, blogs and magazines, but books, especially novels, but also collections of stories. I have a house full of these things, and it always amazes me to meet intelligent, educated adults who have no problem reading and understanding a textbook or a magazine article but who never, ever read a book for pleasure.

I struggle more than a a little with understanding people who never read a book, ever. Strange enough to read nothing but historical nonfiction, or instructional books about your favorite hobby, but to never, ever read a book of any kind is so strange to me. Some of the people I know like this claim they’d read more if they had more time, though of course they have plenty of time for television, DVDs, video games and all other sorts of entertainment.

Sometimes I admit I think less of people like this, even people I know to be intelligent, and otherwise capable. Mostly I feel sorry for them. It really seems to me like a person eating nothing but Wonder bread for every meal, never enjoying a great pizza, or a bowl of steaming clam chowder at the Oregon Coast, or a rib eye steak hot off the grill. It’s sad. It’s a closing-off against one of life’s greatest pleasures. Perhaps more than anything else, it’s like voluntary celibacy, not out of any kind of spiritual desire to abstain, but from simply not understanding what the attraction is in the first place.

It’s a great mystery to me and also to most of the people I know, who wish sincerely for more time to read, and more space to store their books!

Now Working, March 2010

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I often mention my own writing in general terms here, but I’d like to start talking about more specifics. Not so much because I think a lot of people out there (or ANY people out there) are following my work at this point, but because I believe spelling out goals and processes helps clarify them for myself.

Also once I’m an established bestseller, it’ll be a fun larf for people to scroll back to these earliest blog posts and think, “Gee whiz, remember how it was then?”

OK, this is really more about that first reason than that second reason. Quick breakdown, then, of what I’m working on lately. I just finished a short story (when I say “finished” I mean revisions totally complete, not “I wrote a first draft”) about a murderer imprisoned in a strange penal colony, which happens to be on the moon. Plagued by nightmares, he volunteers for a strange experiment related to dreams, which he hopes will cure his nightmares, though that’s not the experiment’s aim.

I’ve spent most of my time this week brainstorming an idea for a novel, not that I intend to actually write the novel any time soon. I’ll keep focusing on short stories the next six months at least. But enough rough ideas for this novel had accumulated that I wanted to coalesce them into a short synopsis, set of outlines/plans, and character lists. It’s set in a near-future Seattle, drastically changed not only from today’s Seattle, but the rest of the world too. It delves into body modification, experimental biotech, brain implants, pleasure games, various forms of addiction, AI tools for trading financial instruments, and more. I’ll probably work on this here and there through the summer, try to hammer out a clear synopsis of 20-30 pages, make sure the interlocking relationships are worked out, then set it aside to gel.

I’m in middle revision stages of the most “space opera” thing I’ve written. It takes place in a transit station at the outer edge of the solar system, where humanity is trying to extend outward by building a series of jumping-off points. It involves a nifty transportation technology I can’t wait to explore further (in other related stories), as well as other cool, strange details I had fun inventing but don’t want to give away here. This was was a lot of fun, with a sort of retro science fiction feel. It’s also the longest short story I’ve written, about 10k words, and I’m trying to decide whether to just go with it, or lose a lot of great stuff by paring it down to under 7500 or so. This one’s fun, sexy, strange, full of wonder, adventure and even a little action. Hell, it’s got ray guns and spaceships! I’d love to write more like this in the future, get away from the too-internalized, slower-paced, “literary” trap I often get stuck in.

I’m also doing final revisions on a long-ish story set 50 or so years in the future, following an apparently wealthy guy from resort to resort around the world, starting in fun, still flashy, future Las Vegas. But this fella’s not an ordinary rich guy, seems to find an unusual amount of trouble, and worries a lot about people following him. I tried to create an enjoyable ride, watching him bounce around while learning who he really is and why he lives like this. I hope to have this one finished and sent out by the end of April.

I have four stories in circulation at various magazines, including the first one I mentioned. My goal is to finish at least one new story per month, and start enough new ones to keep the assembly line fed with raw material. I tend to do many revisions, somewhere between ten and twenty drafts, so in the past that’s meant keeping at least eight or ten stories working at any given time, in different stages. Right now I’m trying to make each revision go a little deeper in to the story, and do fewer “rounds” of revision. In other words I’d rather do seven really intensive revisions than twenty that are mostly surface-level.

Currently I have a list of about thirty “seeds” for stories — brief ideas, partial outlines, or full synopses — and I seem to add to this list of rough stuff faster than I withdraw from it. Often, though, I’ll end up combining two or even three separate ideas into one more complex idea: “Hey, maybe the ‘mind-controlled babysitter on a laser-rifle killing-spree’ story can be combined with the ‘silicon-based aliens from Mercury attack Earth’ story?!” Listen, man, don’t steal that idea!

Recently I set aside all my pre-SF stories, of which six had been completed, and decided not to spread my attention too thin by trying to find markets for those, at least for now. To keep things clearer for myself, I’m working on SF only at this point, setting aside all other work whether finished, in progress, or just planned.

So, quick recap: I’m trying to finish roughly one new story per month, start approximately that many new ones, keep adding raw idea stuff to the list of upcoming story plans, and spending a little time on the side planning the Seattle novel. I have four short stories finished and circulating among short fiction markets. That’s where things stand, and I’ll try to post updates whenever anything changes in an interesting way, like if I get published, switch to writing porn, or whatever.

SF Academy 04 – Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks

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Consider Phlebas is the first novel in Iain M. Banks’s highly-regarded “Culture” series. I’ve been meaning to jump into these books for a while but when you look at them all stacked up next to each other the book store, all those thousands of pages, it can be daunting. Banks is known not only for his science fiction but for some edgy-but-mainstream books (which he differentiates by going as Iain Banks, without the middle initial), and the writing here is at a high level. This is definitely not a case of a “literary” writer slumming in sci-fi and just throwing a few spaceships and alien planets into the mix. There are sections that seem less adeptly written than others, which makes sense given that this is an earlier work by Banks re-written into publishable form after his first novel was released. Most of the book exhibits the confidence and polish of Bank’s more recent work, and overall the story keeps the reader swept along.

The story has quite a bit of action and violence, and covers a very broad swath of space. In the “Culture” series, at least at the beginning, there’s a war between The Culture (a very advanced race, or collective of races, who rely on powerful artificial minds to make live in the Culture one of utopic leisure) and the Idirans, which are a strange race of very large, shell-covered, three-legged beings who don’t age (but can be killed). The war arose due to the Idirans expansion or empire-building (driven by religious fanatacism), which the Culture determined to stop. Banks leaves no question which side he considers morally justified, and his dislike for religion comes through pretty clearly as well. Interestingly, though, the main character (a member of a shape-changing race) is actually working for the Idirans on an agent in their efforts against the Culture.

Consider Phlebas at Amazon.com

The novel has a few flat spots, and there were times I set it down and didn’t pick it back up for several weeks. Overall, though, the story’s world is compelling and its scope is truly impressive. I look forward to taking the next several steps in this series, especially as I understand the second Culture book, Use of Weapons, to be considered the best installment. The whole concept of the Culture spread across vast areas of space, creating utopic living environments free from poverty and disease, is intriguing and well-executed. I look forward to reading future Culture novels that focus more on the Culture and less on the Changers and Idirans.

Avid readers always hope every time they pick up a book by a writer new to them, they’ll be discovering a voice and a creative mind that will grab hold of them and make them want to read through everything the writer’s ever written. Consider Phlebas worked exactly that way for me, and I look forward to reading the entire “Culture” series (I’ve already purchased the next four books), as well as other works by Banks.

Do You Read Novel Excerpts?

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I’m almost finished with the 2009 Nebula Awards Showcase collection, edited by Ellen Datlow. It’s an anthology sampling, as you might guess, stories nominated for Nebula awards (one of the big two annual Science Fiction awards). The stories were first published not during 2009, or during 2008 (when the awards were actually given), but during 2007. That’s not a problem, and it sort of makes sense that 2007 stories might be nominated for awards given in 2008, and it takes a while for the book to be assembled and published so they can call it the 2009 showcase. That’s fine, because I didn’t buy this book thinking these stories were brand new, but if you want to read a collection of stories from 2009 nominated for Nebula awards, those awards will happen in 2010 and the book will come out in 2011.

Nebula Awards Showcase 2009

I’ll write a more complete summary of what I found worthwhile and not so great in this space as soon as I finish up the last story or two, but as I contemplate whether or not to read each and every item in here, I realized: I hate reading “excerpts.” This collection includes a tidbit from Michael Chabon’s well-received novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a book I’d consider reading, but I don’t want to give it a try. If I want to read the book, I’ll read it. I don’t want to give the excerpt a try and get all excited about the story, only to find myself stuck at page twelve.

Likewise, I hate serialized stories (you know, appearing in installments in a periodical), and I hate watching TV shows week-by-week with a wait in-between. My favorite way to watch TV, really just about the only way I’ll bother, is to discover the show on DVD after it’s been out for 3-5 years already, so once I start I can run just about straight through without any delay.

I also just finished a book by a favorite writer of mine, a little surprised to come to the end with such a thick chunk of pages remaining in the book. I thought maybe there’s some kind of essay or glossary or maps or something, but it was just a first chapter from the guy’s next book. I skipped it, because if I really loved it and wanted to read it, I couldn’t yet. The book isn’t available. Stop teasing me!

I’ll follow up with a post on the Nebula collection soon, but for now I’m just venting about those excerpts. I consider them a sort of tease without payoff, rather than a pleasant, enticing little sampler. I’ll have none, thanks.

John Cheever, Master of the Short Story

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One of the great things about the appearance of a major biography of a beloved actor, or filmmaker, or writer, is the surge in magazine and newspaper stories revisiting the individual, taking the biography as a trigger for reappraisal. So if you love John Cheever but you’re not inclined to read through a fat new biographical book, you can read the features in New York Review of Books or Vanity Fair, or both. Both arise in response to Blake Bailey’s new book, Cheever: A Life (Vintage)



The two articles linked above are one part review of the new Cheever bio, and one part discussion of Cheever himself, one of the more interesting American writers from the middle of the twentieth century onward. Often referred-to as “American’s Chekov” for his focus on short fiction rather than novels (though he did write a few noteworthy novels, eventually), Cheever’s mastery of the short form was equalled by few. His works appeared most often in the New Yorker in the 50s and 60s, rubbing shoulders with stuff by John Updike, and competing for the attention of the contemporary American literary scene with J.D. Salinger’s stories and Catcher in the Rye, and Norman Mailer’s fiction and journalism.



I always thought of him less as an American Chekov and more as an F. Scott Fitzgerald for the latter half of the century. Though Fitzgerald ended up being better known for novels, the two writers really flourished in their shorter works, wrote crystalline, poetic sentences, and struggled to keep their personal lives on the rails despite the seeming effortlessness of their prose. Excess of drink, self-destructive affairs, and relationships of unbelievable volatility characterized both lives, and had similarly detrimental effects.



I carried this red paperback around with me, this collection of Cheever’s stories, off an on for years. I never sat down and plowed through the whole 700 or so pages at once, just enjoyed a few stories here and there. It always seemed to me very raw and difficult work, despite the preoccupation with bourgeois, suburban concerns. In fact, if Cheever carried on where Fitzgerald left off, I’d say maybe Raymond Carver took the handoff from Cheever and ran with it.


Certainly the best-known of Cheever’s stories is “The Swimmer,” not only because it’s one of the best, but also because it was made into a film starring Burt Lancaster. In that story, one of the more strange and unreal by this author, an affluent suburban guy sets the goal of swimming around his entire neighborhood, climbing fences and going through the back yards of strangers, swimming one pool after another, stopping to talk to his neighbors (who seem to know what he’s doing). Snippets of conversation allude to something in the guy’s situation being wrong, and eventually the reader realizes the guy’s swimming circuit is not the purely lighthearted adventure it may have seemed at first. Most of Cheever’s stories are about such men, and their wives and families and jobs, but “The Swimmer” is more raw and primal, and touches a nerve without the writer ever cranking up the narrative volume.

Many of Cheever’s stories I’d call more “vignette” or “anecdote” than story, something creative writing teachers (and books) warn new writers against. If you can’t set a scene or draw a character with the finesse of Cheever or Hemingway, probably it’s best not to try to have a story in which not much happens except talk over cocktails, or reminiscence about what an acquaintance used to be like compared to what he’s like now.

I guess the “red book” is out of print now, and a new collection of Cheever stories is available now… this one. Same 700-ish pages so probably the same stuff. Some time soon, I’ll have to get out my red paperback and rediscover some of the most adept and dexterous short stories ever crafted by an American writer.



The Stories of John Cheever

SF Academy 03 – The Door Into Summer by Robert Heinlein

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Often I plan out which books I’ll read next well in advance, like a Netflix queue, but with a tangle stack of actual objects lined-up to read. This time at the last minute I grabbed this one rather than the Robert Charles Wilson book I’d planned on.

The Door Into Summer was originally released in 1957. Hey, check out this old paperback cover. Remember when books used to look like that? If you’re old like me, you probably do. This was somewhere near the author’s peak, and this novel is one of Heinlein’s best-regarded works.

It’s a story of a clever engineer named Daniel Boone Davis (though he goes by Dan or DB most of the time), and Heinlein certainly gave him the name “Daniel Boone” in reference to the American folk hero & pioneer. DB possesses a good, confident nature and seems mostly unrattled by the screwing-over dealt him by his fiancee and his business partner. He’s unhappy enough about things, though, that he decides to go in for “the long sleep,” a hibernation newly offered in the 1970 in which the novel begins.

I don’t want to reveal the convolutions of the aforementioned screwing-over, or the jumps forward and backward in time between 1970 and 2000 involved in DB’s efforts to set things right. But this is a cracking good tale, old fashioned in some details and yet fresh and futuristic even a half-century after it was written. Many of the other characters are better-drawn than the protagonist, and some of the more interesting parts of the novel are told in summary, such as Dan’s quick recap of all he learned after coming out of the sleep. This is a book packed with ideas, and it’s a great example of why Heinlein was so influential over the science fiction field for such a long period of time.

One aspect of the story that “feels” a bit strange is Dan’s very close relationship with a girl of eleven or so. They start off as buddies, though young Ricky clearly has a crush on Dan. At some point, after a bit of time-shifting to adjust the relative ages, Dan sets his sights on her as a sort of romantic partner. Without spoiling anything, there’s at least one fairly queasy sequence in which Dan fixates on the little girl as a potential future partner while she’s still a little girl. I wonder if this part raised many eyebrows back in the fifties?

Another surprising element is Heinlein’s inclusion of a nudist couple who become Dan’s friends. The manner in which Heinlein portrays the members of this nudist colony is somewhere between affectionate and admiring, and the only really “good” characters in the book, other than Dan and Ricky, are the two nudists who befriend Dan. There’s nothing too racy in the nudist colony part of the book, but it’s surprising that an author as plainly conservative as Heinlein would be so cool about an edgy issue so long ago. Then again, conservative meant something different in those days, and Heinlein might better be called libertarian. And of course I haven’t read Stranger in a Strange Land yet (scandal!) so maybe I’m the last to discover Heinlein was actually a swinging wildman.

I recommend this book highly, and it’s probably one of the top two or three dozen favorite science fiction books I’ve read. Really a lot of fun, and as I mentioned in an earlier post here, it made me grin quite a few times at one turn or another. That quality, fun, is something I value very highly in a story, and this one’s got it.

The Door into Summer, on amazon.com

Really Loving The Door Into Summer

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I’m not quite done with The Door Into Summer yet, but really enjoying it. I was just thinking, as I read this, that Robert Heinlein reminded me an awful lot of Tom Clancy, then I stumbled upon a quote in which Clancy expressed admiration for Heinlein. Weird, because they wrote such different stuff, and to me the similarity was really just in the simple, old-fashioned masculine confidence of the characters. Both writers obviously respect hard work and military service and expertise in things like engineering and science and economics.

Anyway, this blog isn’t really meant for formal reviews, more like semi-formal expressions of enthusiasm or disdain, but I still haven’t quite finished the book yet so I’ll wait before writing more.

Just wanted to say this one puts a smile on my face at least once per day, and though it was written before I was born, the small dated aspects don’t bother me at all. Makes me want to read a bunch more Heinlein this summer!